If it appears in a serious publication, it acquired the gloss of ascribed credibility. After all, a serious publication wouldn’t publish something that wasn’t true, right? And there can be no doubt that Scientific American is a serious publication. So when daddy-blogger Jeremy Adam Smith’s How the Science of “Blue Lies” May Explain Trump’s Support appeared in such a credible publication, maybe he was on to something.

Granted, the title used the word “may,” the weasel word to cover the lack of commitment to the thesis. But it also used the word science, and it’s a word that distinguishes the lunatic theories from truth. Even the New York Times emphasized that difference today, trying to wrap up its agenda in scientific truth, which the Philistines are systematically dismantling.

We know about white lies, the inconsequential lies of kindness that do no harm and avoid needlessly hurt feelings. We know about black lies, the evil lies told to conceal malevolent and selfish deeds that are good for the teller but harmful to others. But blue lies?

Blue lies are a different category altogether, simultaneously selfish and beneficial to others—but only to those who belong to your group. As University of Toronto psychologist Kang Lee explains, blue lies fall in between generous white lies and selfish “black” ones. “You can tell a blue lie against another group,” he says, which makes it simultaneously selfless and self-serving. “For example, you can lie about your team’s cheating in a game, which is antisocial, but helps your team.”

These are the lies told to serve one agenda and quash another, but are good lies to the extent the agenda serves is one with which you agree, and bad lies if not. This is the “lie v. lie” dilemma, where in the service of what one believes to be a higher calling, lies are merely weapons of war. And Smith’s opening line reveals the war.

Donald Trump tells lies.

What follows is his deconstruction of why his lies, obvious to anyone who isn’t on board, is acceptable to his followers. Or to put it less gingerly, why don’t his supporters care that he’s lying.

But Trump’s political path presents a paradox. Far from slowing his momentum, his deceit seemed only to strengthen his support through the primary and national election. Now, every time a lie is exposed, his support among Republicans doesn’t seem to waver very much. In the wake of the Comey revelations, his average approval rating held at 40 percent.

This has led many people to ask themselves: How does the former reality-TV star get away with it? How can he tell so many lies and still win support from many Americans?

This question is posed by many people, mostly in the camp of his adversaries. And it’s a good question, regardless of one’s politics. It begins with the fact that people are people, despite the narratives we tell to make ourselves feel as if some are more righteous than others.

This research—and those stories—highlight a difficult truth about our species: We are intensely social creatures, but we’re prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial—compassionate, empathic, generous, honest—in their groups, and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence—and socially sanctioned deceit.

Our in-group is good. The out-group is not. We love ours. We don’t love theirs. And because cognitive dissonance is a thing, we get around it by dehumanizing the other team. We’re smart, they’re not. We’re decent and kind. They’re deplorable. Isn’t it more important to promote virtuous things like human decency than such amorphous things as truth?

Except Smith’s post isn’t a scientific ‘splainer of human failings when it comes to truth, but an explanation of why Trump’s supporters don’t recognize or care that he lies in the service of what they believe to be a worthy cause.

“People condone lying against enemy nations, and since many people now see those on the other side of American politics as enemies, they may feel that lies, when they recognize them, are appropriate means of warfare,” says George Edwards, a Texas A&M political scientist and one of the country’s leading scholars of the presidency.

It’s war out there, and wars need to be won by any means possible.

If we see Trump’s lies not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might see him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.

And this, Smith contends, explains why Trump supporters persist in “believing” his lies, not because they actually believe it but because they see his lies as weapons in the greater war, and they believe in the war.

It’s in blue lies that the best and worst in humanity can come together. They reveal our loyalty, our ability to cooperate, our capacity to care about the people around us and to trust them. At the same time, blue lies display our predisposition to hate and dehumanize outsiders, and our tendency to delude ourselves.

Is there a way to compel these blue lies matter supporters to confront their acquiescence in lies? Smith offers a solution.

They recommend a cluster of prosaic techniques, such as presenting information as imagery or graphics, instead of text. The best combination appears to be graphics with stories. But this runs up against another scientific insight, one that will be frustrating to those who would oppose Trump’s lies: Who tells the story matters. Study after study shows that people are much more likely to be convinced of a fact when it “originates from ideologically sympathetic sources,” as the paper says—and it helps a lot if those sources look and sound like them.

In short, it is white conservatives who must call out Trump’s lies, if they are to be stopped.

Indeed, one is more likely to accept a premise proposed by someone they trust. Which raises the curious problem with Smith’s point. While it may be understandable that blue lies matter, they matter to everyone, not just Trump supporters. Trump lies. So do his adversaries, and they believe the lies or the same reason because they are no different than his supporters, just on the other team.

It would seem odd that a publication like Scientific American would use its credibility on such a thesis to promote such a flagrantly one-sided point, even if there is merit in the rationale. And the irony is that Smith’s explanation seems sound, if not particularly surprising, but he’s the victim of it rather than the narrator.

Donald Trump lies, yes, but that doesn’t mean rest of us, his supporters included, need to follow his example.

You don’t need to, but still you do, just for the other team. But then, you’re right and he’s wrong, so it’s a feature, not a bug.